An information retrieval system uses terms and phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. When a user enters a search query, the terms in the query are identified and used to retrieve documents from the information retrieval system, and then rank them. However, in sparse information retrieval systems, such as music search engines, there is often not enough data per document to distinguish documents from each other. Consequently, searches in such sparse information retrieval systems may result in ambiguous scoring of the documents associated with the search terms and phrases, which leads to non-optimal ranking of the search results.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with some aspects of the present method and apparatus set forth in the remainder of this disclosure with reference to the drawings.